READING WAKANDA

Acknowledgements

The Southern California Library extends its heartfelt thanks to the contributors to this reader, who donated their time and labor to offer perspectives on the film, Black Panther. We value their voices and their work, and hope this reader contributes in some small way to sharing the analysis they are able to offer.

Contributors

Mone’ Anderson is an activist and intersectional feminist who enjoys writing, painting and working on dismantling oppressive structures. Erica R. Meiners is a writer, a long distance runner, and the author of For the Children? Protecting Innocence in the Carceral State (2016). Both teach and learn at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.

Stephanie Batiste is an associate professor in the Black Studies & English departments at UC Santa Barbara and the author of Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression Era African American Performance (2012). She writes, performs in, and, on occasion, directs dramatic works. She has performed in community and professional theaters and participated in special programs at both.

Max Felker-Kantor is a historian whose primary areas of interest are policing, race, politics, urban history, and social movements in the U.S. He is the author of Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (2018). He currently teaches American and African American history at Ball State University.

Rachel Herzing is the communications coordinator for RoadMap, a team from across the country dedicated to advancing the power and promise of social justice organizations. She is also a long-time organizer fighting against imprisonment and policing and for self-determination and a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex.

Gerald Horne is a prolific author who holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations and war. He has also written extensively about the film industry.

Joy James is a scholar-activist and professor of the humanities and political science at Williams College. The author of Seeking the ‘Beloved Community’ (2013) and editor of The New Abolitionists; Imprisoned Intellectuals (2005); Warfare in the American Homeland, she is completing a book projected titled, “Fulcrum: The Captive Maternal Leverages Democracy.”

Shana Redmond is an interdisciplinary scholar of music, race, and politics at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and has trained as a vocalist. She is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (2014), an interdisciplinary cultural history that tracks the songs that organized the Black world in the twentieth century.

Dylan Rodríguez is professor of the Ethnic Studies department at UC Riverside and the author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (2009). He is a founding member of Critical Resistance and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and has worked in or alongside various social movements and activist collectives.

Damien Sojoyner is an urban anthropologist with a disaporic framework. He is an assistant professor & graduate admissions director in the Anthropology department at UC Irvine and the author of First Strike: Educational Enclosures of Black Los Angeles (2016).

Jackie Wang is a queer poet, essayist, filmmaker, performer, alien, and prison abolitionist and the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), which includes an influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.